Oral literature

Oral literature, the standard forms (or genres) of literature found in societies without writing. The term oral literature is also used to describe the tradition in written civilizations in which certain genres are transmitted by word of mouth or are confined to the so-called folk (i.e., those who are “unlettered,” or do not use writing).

Oral literature is, arguably, the best phrase available for describing these two senses. The term oral covers both, but these two meanings should be distinguished. While certain forms, such as the folktale, continue to exist, especially among the unlettered component of complex societies, what might also be called oral tradition (or folk literature) is inevitably influenced by the elite written culture. The term literature also poses problems because it is ultimately derived from the Latin littera, “letter,” essentially a written, indeed alphabetic, concept. Among scholars, the phrases standardized oral forms and oral genres have been suggested in place of oral literature, but, since the word literature is so widely used, it has to be reckoned with, even though it is essential to recall the major differences between the two registers, oral and written, as well as the way in which the latter influences the spoken word.

The relation of speech to writing

Because writing is an additional register to speech, writing’s advent has an important influence on speech. Writing’s effects have been dramatic on society generally, but, for much of the vast span of recorded history, writing and reading were confined to a small, elite minority of a population, while a large proportion of people continued to depend on oral communication alone. In many cases these two traditions existed side by side. Such a combination creates problems for the analysis of the various genres or oral literature, for there is a tendency today to read back the characteristics of literate literature (such as the use of a narrative structure) into purely oral genres. Written literature is never simply a matter of writing down what already exists; a myth or story is always changed in being “transcribed” and takes its place among a set of new genres as well as among modifications of old ones.

The term folklore generally refers to certain of the spoken (or nonwritten) activities of complex literate cultures where only a minority can read and write and where the rest are illiterate, a frequent situation of the peasantry in the post-Bronze Age cultures of Europe and Asia especially. While these activities have some links with parallel ones in purely oral cultures, they are inevitably influenced by the always-dominant literary modes, especially those related to the major (written) religions. (Folklore is largely confined to the exposition of peripheral beliefs.) But even the forms taken by genres such as the epic can influence folklore.

It is clear that, in societies with writing, a great deal of communication—including communication that takes literary forms—is still done by word of mouth. Not only is this an aspect of all human intercourse, but it was inevitably the case until near-universal literacy was achieved in Europe during the last quarter of the 19th century. Until that time, literature had to be oral for the large part of the population. That did not mean oral literature was uninfluenced by the written word. Indeed, some of the oral communication consisted in the repetition of written texts, as when lessons from the Bible were preached to an unlettered populace. A written epic, as was the case with the Hindu Vedas or the works of Homer, might be learned by heart and recited to the population at large, by priests in the former case and by the rhapsodes in the latter. Of course a society with writing might inherit some genres, such as folktales, largely unchanged from an earlier, purely oral culture whereas other genres, such as the epic, would undergo a sea change.

Part of the influence of the written word on speech consisted in the development not of oratory but of its formal counterpart, rhetoric, with its explicit body of rules. Specialists in the spoken word might achieve fame and be rewarded for their appearance in presenting a case at court. More directly in the field of the arts, specialist reciters, especially of praise songs but also of epics and other lengthy recitations, might be recompensed for their contributions, either as freelance performers or as professionals.

Many early written forms, such as the Breton lays, draw their subject matter from spoken genres, though inevitably transformations take place in the face of the new media. There has also been a good deal of exchange between coexistent folk and written (elite) literature. Homer’s poems incorporated “popular” tales, for example, as did the Anglo-Saxon Beowulf, although these transfers are as much between genres as between the registers of speech and writing, akin to when popular melodies, such as the bourrée of rural France, were taken up by those composing elite music in the urban courts of 17th-century Europe.

The example of the epic

The Homeric poems are often viewed as oral epics that have been transposed into writing. Commentators have dwelt on the presence of certain features, such as the formulaic expressions (epithets and repeated verses) that they see as typical of oral forms. Yet, while the regular repetition of phrases is found in such forms, some have argued that the precise format of Homer’s formula—as defined by the American scholar Milman Parry, who in the 1930s recorded epics in Yugoslavia performed by guslari—is very likely an early literate device.

The epic itself is a case in point. It is often assumed to be a typical product of oral cultures, being sung by bards at courts or in camps. However, records of epics in purely oral cultures are sparse. Epics tend to be found in early states with important warrior classes that enjoy hearing of the brave exploits of their predecessors. These societies already have writing, but the texts are often committed to memory and reproduced by the speaker rather than read aloud from a written version of the text. These oral texts are recited in gatherings of chiefs and warriors by specialist bards and, in fact, are the works that have been written down at some point. Indeed, only because they have been written down are they known at all. And it is a regular characteristic of early written works, such as Homer’s or the Vedas, that, although written versions exist, these are learned by heart, internalized, and reproduced through the spoken word alone, just as is often the case with religious texts such as the Qurʾān and the Bible. At the very moment in history when writing allows one to dispose of verbal memory as a means of recalling such works, the role of verbal memory is in fact enhanced—hence part of the difficulty in deciding whether these works are both orally composed and orally reproduced. They are typical of societies where only the few can read and where mnemonic skills and devices that encourage the perfect oral reproduction of written texts are therefore encouraged.

The way that purely oral forms have been changed under the influence of written cultures is illustrated by the Kalevala, the Finnish national epic, a final version of which was published in 1849 by Elias Lönnrot. A systematic collector of folk poetry, Lönnrot concluded that what had been recorded as distinct poems could be conflated into a continuous folk epic. He joined a number of shorter compositions together with material of his own and imposed on the whole a unifying plot. Its publication had an enormous influence on Finnish culture. It has been suggested that the Gilgamesh epic may have been constructed in a similar way; other cases have been reported from Africa. In North America stories that centre on particular characters such as Coyote or Raven (seeRaven cycle) are sometimes grouped together by scholars into cycles, but it seems doubtful whether these cycles represent a meaningful category for the Native Americans who created these tales.

Differences between oral and written literatures

Oral and written literatures differ in their authorship and audience. In oral cultures the memory of authorship, though never entirely absent, is of little general importance—occasionally with songs but not with myths, folktales, and, rarely, epics. That is not to say that these genres do not become the subjects of intellectualproperty rights. Songs may be associated with particular clans, recitations with specific groups or gatherings. But usually no individual author is traced. That absence, however, does not imply that there is a process of collectivecomposition. Each reciter will introduce variations of his own, some of which will be taken up by succeeding speakers for whom the previous version will have been the (or a) model. In this way changes are constantly being introduced by individuals but anonymously, in a syntagmatic (contextual) chain, without looking back to any fixed original. Only with writing and with oral recitations in literate societies, as in the case of Homer or the Vedas, is the oral transmission of an original possible, partly because writing introduces a new dimension to verbal memory and partly because reference can then always be made back to the “correct” version. As a result, it seems to be in these early literate societies that the development of mnemonic skills and aide-mémoire is first found.

While these genres are not necessarily always given separate designations in local languages, in scholarly practice they are distinguished because of their different forms, content, and functions, which relate partly to their audience. At the very broadest level, folktales are rarely seen as anything but fictional, whereas the other genres, apart from song, have quite a different relation to “truth.” In purely oral societies, recitations and songs encompass the whole of life’s experience, including cosmology and theology. In early societies with writing, the religious domain tends to be incorporated by way of texts associated with a religion’s canon (its most important scriptural works), leaving the oral literature to deal with the peripheral—with magic, charms, and fairy tales.

With oral literature, as with any other literature, it is important to always consider not only the speaker but the audience and the situational context. Intention, form, and content make all the difference between recitations in a religious or ritual ceremony and the kind of story told at a veillée (a small private gathering for storytelling) in Europe. These differences mean that to incorporate all these genres in one holistic analysis of culture, symbolism, or myth runs the risk of mixing levels of communication that should be the subject of distinct interpretations.

Folktales

Folktales are virtually universal. These are short, occasionally in verse, sometimes with an ending that echoes the explanations embedded in Rudyard Kipling’s Just So Stories (e.g., “How the Camel Got His Hump”), and possibly with an irrelevant coda. The personages consist of humans, animals, gods, and, more rarely, inventions such as giants and monsters, who interact with one another by speech and by other means. In this wide array of tales there is a place for the salacious, and some stories are apparently directed to adults (or at least to adolescents), but the bulk of folktales undoubtedly anticipate an audience of children. Grim as some of their contents can be, they are “nursery tales,” to use an English term equivalent to Charles Perrault’s “fairy stories” (contes des fées).

Because the vast number of folktales are intended for children, it is quite mistaken for anthropologists to use them as evidence of the typical thoughts of primitive societies or for historians to do the same for, say, the rural population of 17th-century Europe. But just such an approach is sometimes taken by those who see culture holistically, with each item having the same representative status and value in characterizing mentalities, beliefs, and practices and with each item taken to exist within an undifferentiated cultural ensemble of artistic forms. In fact, the relationship of these stories to other aspects of culture is very particular.

While their relationships to culture are very particular, the stories told within folktales also persist over long periods of time and have no very close relationship to a particular culture at a particular time; examples from English-speaking societies include children’s rhymes and songs such as “Ring a Ring of Roses” and “Three Blind Mice” and the story “Jack and the Beanstalk.” Like the rhyme “Frères Jacques” or the story of Cinderella, they cross sociopolitical and linguistic boundaries rather freely and are adapted by individual storytellers. Such movement across boundaries is encouraged by the relatively small size of individual oral cultures, and these stories may be transposed into other dialects and other languages; the ease with which that can happen emphasizes the transcultural character of their themes and expressions. It is this comparative insulation of children’s stories that, arguably, accounts for their relative homogeneity around the world, as does their frequent use of nonhuman animals and panhuman themes.

Fables are a subcategory of the folktale, employing animals as well as humans as the main characters. In the form they are known today, either from ancient Greece and Rome (e.g., Aesop’s fables) or from India, they are in fact products of written cultures but are close in many respects to folktales more generally.

Song

Song plays a very general role in oral culture. A song’s words often resemble lyric poetry, having to be of a tight metrical structure because of the musical accompaniment. Equally, when epic and other recitations are accompanied by a musical instrument or a strong beat, the rhythmic verbal structure is always influenced. An important variety of song is the lament at the death of an individual, which may take the form of stressed speech or follow a more melodic line.

Songs may be included in rituals and in folktales and other genres, but they are often performed solely for entertainment. The melodies themselves may be elaborated and expanded upon by way of musical instruments, leading to innumerable variations invented for the occasion, as with jazz. An important subcategory is the work song, the performance of which is likely to be gendered, as is the work itself.

The ballad is a form of narrative song that arose in Europe during the Middle Ages and hence is arguably part of a mixed oral-literary tradition. The genre displays strong metrical forms associated with a melodic accompaniment; it is often concerned with conflict (especially in the Scottish-English border ballads of the 15th and 16th centuries), celebrating heroes and outlaws, and has held its popularity in the modern period, as exemplified in popular songs such as “Frankie and Johnny.” Narrative songs of this kind are much less common in oral cultures, though varieties of the form mark early literate societies.

Songs are distinguished from chant by being shorter and more melodic. Chant is a rhythmic manner of presenting speech that verges on recitation; while it may be accompanied, chant is carried out with a regular beat that does not interfere greatly with the words, which are deemed more important than the music. Chant may be used for shorter recitals and in such contexts as the Maori haka, and it is sometimes employed for epic poetry or for the long recitations typically categorized as myth.

Folk drama

Theatre in the modern sense is an outcome of the written tradition in Greece, Europe, India, Japan, and elsewhere. It is sometimes difficult to draw a distinction between drama and ritual; indeed, the origins of drama in Europe lie in religious and ritual performances. The occurrence of secular drama in oral cultures is not well attested and, where it does occur, is peripheral. Nevertheless, (folk) plays of a more or less secular kind do occur in the popular culture of literate societies, such as the mumming plays of the European tradition, which stand in opposition to the written plays of the elite theatre.

Myth

Myth is a particular form of oral literature, the subject of which is cosmological. It was earlier thought that many such stories were explanatory. A few undoubtedly are, including those of “that is why the camel has a hump” variety, but most are not, even though intellectual curiosity (sometimes expressed through the notion of the quest, for example) is often incorporated. For some commentators, myth was central to folktales: the meaning of folktales was seen to derive from their assumed status as broken-down myths that accounted for solar, meteorological, or other natural phenomena. Other commentators (such as representatives of the myth and ritual school at the beginning of the 20th century) have seen the explanation of myth as a function of ritual and of ritual as a function of myth. Such an explanation, however, does little to explain the content of myth or ritual. Others, such as Bronisław Malinowski and the functionalist school, have understood myth as a legitimizing “charter” of social institutions. Later in the 20th century there was a move to interpretations of myth that were dependent on a search for hidden meanings, some relying on psychoanalysis, others on different approaches to symbolic decoding, and yet others on structuralist analyses, especially in the work of Claude Lévi-Strauss, which sought in myths an underlying structure of abstract similarities (often binary in character) between a range of social institutions.

Myth is often considered to be the highest achievement of oral literature. It has certainly proved to be the most interesting to outsiders and at the same time the most difficult to comprehend, because, even though it deals in cosmological matters, myth is in some ways the most localized of genres and the most embedded in cultural action (such as when it is recited in a very specific ceremonial context). The oral literature of the Australian Aborigines, for example, has an essential ceremonial function. The song cycles and narratives relate to the Dreaming, a mythological past in which the existing environment was shaped and humanized by ancestral beings. These performances may be open to the world at large (and hence akin to entertainment) or closed to all but initiates.

It is important to distinguish between contributions to mythologies (i.e., accounts of worldviews constructed by observers) and myths in a narrower sense, which are actual recitations around a cosmological theme (for example, creation myths). The latter are relatively rare and unevenly distributed around the world, being recited in particular restricted circumstances. As such, the knowledge they contain is available not to all but only to certain individuals. Women in some groups, for example, may be excluded from certain ritual occasions. Yet these women, precluded from some knowledge, may also have parallel ceremonies from which men are excluded and during which women hand down different bodies of knowledge.

Myths were earlier thought to have been transmitted verbatim from one generation to the next, partly because that is how those who conveyed the myths often understood the situation. As such, the myths were interpreted as “keys to culture,” throwing a privileged light on society as a whole. But the advent of the portable audio recorder and of air travel enabled investigators to return at intervals to record such recitations in the actual context of performance rather than with pencil and paper in a decontextualized situation. These new techniques showed that myths vary considerably over time, the exigencies of oral reproduction making such generative transmission a virtual necessity. In other words: people invent and fill in where they do not have perfect recall. The result is a plurality of versions spread over time (and space), but, arguably, no fixed text such as often found with written literature.

Legends and historical recitations

Legends and historical recitations—or “histories”—occur everywhere: chiefless societies might produce stories of clan migration, for instance, while chiefly societies might generate stories of the coming of rulers and of the establishment of kingdoms. Examples proliferate with writing and become more differentiated, but they exist in purely oral cultures as an important formal activity, to be told on ritual occasions. These genres may also be associated with totemism, telling how a particular animal helped a past ancestor in troubled times and so is taboo to his or her descendants. The term legend (derived from the Latin legenda, “to be read”) was especially applied to the stories of saints in Roman Catholic Europe, but similar kinds of narrative, believed to be true, are also characteristic of oral cultures and often later form the basis for the construction of written histories, as was the case in early Greece.

Some formalized historical recitations in purely oral cultures retain earlier forms and content that have passed out of current usage. The speech of former generations can legitimize the material within a recitation, making that material more valuable and more sacred at the time of the recitation, but it can also make the material less comprehensible, more mysterious, and more prone to conflicting and ambiguous interpretations. More broadly, histories are often more concerned with legitimation, especially in providing a suggested link with the distant past, rather than with the story itself.

Performance, content, and distribution

In oral cultures the genres described above are not simply categories in a library catalog but are part of an ensemble of actions that constitute the setting, often the ritual, and sometimes the music and dance of the performers; these actions also guide the voice and gestures and the intentions of the performers, as well as the audience and its expectations. Each genre has its characteristic context of performance, its own place, its own time, its own performers, and its own aims. Myths, in the concrete sense, are unlikely to be recited by “ordinary” people but instead by specialists in special ritual contexts. Folktales may be told by adults who have built up a reputation for doing so, but they are more likely to make the rounds within families or among groups of children.

Given the variety of genres of oral literature, it is difficult to generalize about their content as a whole, but it is (perhaps misleadingly) easy to generalize within each genre. Mythology deals with gods, deities, and supernatural agencies in their relationship—whether distant or close—with humankind. Epics often deal with human as well as half-divine heroes and monsters. Folktales show a nearly universal concern with animals, and they introduce as actors humans, gods, and sometimes monsters. The widespread inclusion of animals, in turn, may indicate a recognition of a continuity between living things; animals often reenact the lives of humans, not only by speaking but in their roles and actions. A continuity between living things is also expressed in tales of humans born of animals, being cared for by them (as in the case of Romulus and Remus, the legendary founders of Rome), or being looked after by them in a more mystical sense (as with the North American Indian notion of the guardian spirit or in versions of totemism where humankind is aided by or even descended from an animal). Yet animals recur across many of the genres that can be classed as oral literature, where they take on multiple meanings and stand for many concepts. It is, again, difficult to generalize in good faith about the content of oral literature.

While similar genres are found widely distributed in oral cultures and in oral traditions, they do not occur equally in all contexts. Long recitations defined above as myths are very unequally distributed even in neighbouring societies that otherwise display rather similar practices and beliefs, for they occur only under very restricted conditions. Epics and histories tend to be associated with warrior and chiefly societies, respectively. Some researchers have argued that there appears to be little use of proverbs and riddles in America, a situation they contrast with Africa, where collections of proverbs (such as those made in Asante by the Swiss missionary J.G. Christaller) were considered very common. (Other researchers disagree and question the historical and geographical generalizations embodied in such characterizations of “America” and “Africa.”)

The content of myths and legends is considered by many in oral societies to be true; by contrast, the content of folktales and fables is believed to be fictional. While the first are often tied to particular societies (and later to written religions), the latter travel relatively freely between groups, including linguistic groups. That ability to travel reaffirms the fact that both have a different “truth” status, with folktales rarely tied to specific cosmologies but instead showing a more universal appeal, especially to children. Märchen (folktales with an element of the magical or supernatural) and ghost stories have a wider appeal and are widespread features of both oral literature and written literature told orally; monsters are found in many societies, and even specific types, such as dragons, turn up over large areas. Fairies and trolls are found yet more frequently as characters in folktales and cosmologies, operating as intermediaries between humankind and the higher deities and either helping or hindering their activities. Attempts to explain “rationally” and “historically” (which are nothing but speculation) the contents of oral literature have led the enquiry down false paths. As with oral literature in general, it is essential, wherever possible, to consider the context of performance and of transmission.